WoD Brewmaster changes

[Lovestar]

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OP last updated:
June 04, 2014 (pre Alpha invites)

Discussion thread still healthy / alive, but OP is now increasingly out-of-date / out-of-sync with current state of Alpha/Beta.

Known changes coming in WoD
(updated with new patch notes)

New abilities in WoD

"Draenor Perks"

• Gained automatically, one per level, while leveling 90-100.
• Elusive Brew now increases dodge chance by an additional 5%.
• Your Breath of Fire spell now always applies its damage over time effect to the target.
• Guard now has 2 charges.
• Stamina bonus of Stance of the Sturdy Ox increased by 20%.
• Dizziying Haze no longer has an energy cost.
• Roll now travels the same distance in 25% less time.
• The cooldown of Transcendence is lowered by 35 sec, and Transcendence: Transfer is now instant cast.
• Damage of Keg Smash increased by 20%.
• Damage of Blackout Kick increased by 20%.

Level 100 Talent Choices

• Soul Dance: Passive. 30% of your normal Stagger amount works against magic damage.
• Chi Explosion: Replaces Blackout Kick. Consumes up to 4 Chi to cause the target to explode with Chi energy, causing additional effects based on Chi consumed. 1 Chi, 40 yd range, Instant.
  
  • 1+ Chi: Deals Nature damage to an enemy equal to XXXX plus XXXX per Chi consumed.
  • 2+ Chi: You also gain Shuffle for 2 sec plus 2 sec per Chi consumed.
  • 3+ Chi: Also purifies all of your Staggered damage.
  • 4 Chi: Also damages all enemies within 8 yards of the target.
• Chi Serenity: For 10 seconds, all Chi consumptions are instantly refilled. Instant. 1.5 min cooldown.

New Glyphs

• Expel Harm: Expel Harm's energy cost is reduced by XXXX while your health is below 35%.
• Keg Smash: Increases the range on Keg Smash by XXXX yards.
• Victory Roll: You gain XXXX charges of Roll or Chi Torpedo whenever you kill a target that grants experience or honor.
• Freedom Roll: Your Roll, Chi Torpedo, and Flying Serpent Kick abilities dispel all snares affecting you when used.

Other new abilities

• Surging Mist: Now available to Brewmasters. Costs 30 Energy. 1.5 second cast. Does not generate Chi. No cooldown.
• Brewmasters can now cast the 5% Crit buff.

Readinesss has been removed.
New stat replaces it: Versatility. Simply increases Damage, Healing, Absorbs by 1%, and reduces your damage taken by 0.5%, per XXXX rating.

Changes

Removed abilities (GONE)

• Clash
• Avert Harm
• Power Guard (was a proc that gave +15% bonus to next Guard after Tiger Palm)
• Grapple (aka Monk Disarm)
• Disable (aka Monk Hamstring)
• Healing Sphere (the manual ground-targeted ability)
• Fierce Tiger Stance (Brewmasters are now always, automatically in Ox Stance)
• Black Ox Statue no longer places absorbs on raid members.

Changed abilities

• Spear Hand Strike no longer Silences the target if they’re facing the Monk.
• Ring of Peace no longer Silences or Disarms enemies. It now incapacitates targets in the area for 3 seconds, or until the target takes damage.
• Transcendence no longer costs Energy.
• Touch of Death is now usable on targets that have 10% or less health remaining, or have less current health than your maximum health. It still causes damage equal to your maximum Health.
• Black Ox Statue now passively pulses a minor amount of threat to all enemies within 30 yards (baseline effect, does not require a glyph).

Changes to Active Mitigation

• Weakened Blows debuff removed. All enemies now passively do less damage.

Talent changes

• Dampen Harm now triggers on damage >= 15% of your total Health.

Gift of the Ox (healing spheres) & Multistrike

• Multistrike is a new stat. All your attacks & heals have a chance to happen again for 30% of the original attack/heal.
• Tiger Strikes modified — Monks now always have a chance on autoattack to gain temporary Multistrike.
• Gift of the Ox now only triggers from autoattack Multistrikes.
• You no longer use up all your spheres by touching them while damaged. Only enough spheres to heal you (without overhealing) will be consumed.

Vengeance changes

• Vengeance has been removed.
• Tanks now have a new ability, Resolve, which passively triggers whenever you take damage.
• Resolve: Increases your healing and absorption done to yourself, based on Stamina and damage taken (before avoidance and mitigation) in the last 10 seconds.

Tank Stats (Mastery, etc) & Tank DPS

• Bonus Armor is the new Tank stat. It only works for Tank specs and counts against item budget, meaning items with Bonus Armor are nerfed in Windwalker or Mistweaver spec.
• Baseline Tank damage has been increased so that even without Vengeance, a Tank playing well will do about 75% of the DPS of a 'real' DPS.
• Brewmasters no longer have a 15% damage penalty.
• Mastery: Elusive Brawler now also passively increases Attack Power by 8% (percentage increased by Mastery), in addition to boosting your Stagger amount.
• Bonus Armor also grants an equal amount of Attack Power for all Tank specs.

Other stats

• There is only one gear type for Monks now — Leather. (plus accessory slots) It will provide Agility for Brewmaster/Windwalker, and Intellect for Mistweaver.
• Accessories (Cloak, Neck, Rings, Trinkets) will have role-specific stats (Bonus Armor, Spirit), so you will need different sets of accessories for each spec.
• Hit & Expertise removed. Brewmasters are now automatically Miss, Dodge, and Parry-capped vs. targets up to 3 levels higher (including Bosses).
• Agility no longer increases Crit chance.
• Base Crit chance is now 5% for all classes and all Crit bonuses affect melee, range, and spells equally.
• New passive: Critical Strikes. Increases chance to critically strike by 10%.
• The amount of Dodge gained per point of Agility has been reduced by 25%.

[Raugnaut]

While Avert Harm being removed is sad, it was expected, and the magic-stagger talent can be taken for magic damage.
Lack of disable means no roots. Possible problem with some soloing fights, perhaps pvp issue as well.
Clash being gone is probably a part of the CC removal pass. Buggy ability in PvE as well.
Power Guard probably gonna be baked into Guard..
Other then that, some good changes. BoF perk is puzzling. It DOES allow it to be used for damage on boss fights with AoE with haze-immune mobs, but if a BrM wanted extra AoE damage, they would take chi explosion. I do hope you will be able to have Guard stack for a massive absorb once/minute with the 2 charges portion. Stamina/Elusive Brew bonus is nice. With the Stamina buff, Monks will have the second-highest health pool come WoD, with Druids having tons more over everyone.

Leer of the Ox means that healers will never have to worry about aggro with a monk in the group. Dizzying Haze change just means that you'll cap energy when kiting things.

Now, for me, personally, the Transcedence change is sweet. Instant Transcedence means you have a counter for fall damage on fights where it matters!

[Lovestar]

The Guard charges will almost certainly not stack, similar to Shield Barrier for Warriors, etc.

I suspect it's intended to allow us to hold Guard for emergencies without feeling guilty for using it 'early' to blunt an attack or smooth some damage intake. A very generous change, tbh.

[Angrybathtub]

I don't understand why they would give us surging mists.

[Lovestar]

I don't understand why they would give us surging mists.

Check the Removed Abilities list.

[Ealyssa]

I don't understand why they would give us surging mists.

Because all classes with an healing spec has an healing spell in other specs. Healing sphere being removed they "had to" give us something else.


Outside of clash being removed, and the 100 talents bein poorly done for tanking (marginal magic survival bonus, dumbed down rotation, or nearly useless free chi) I like it. I pretty sur they will nerf the avoidance of BrM during alpha/beta. With the nerf of the other tanks can't see BrM staying with that much passive avoidance built in (whille still having stagger and the double guard).

[Sunnydee]

reading the increased stamina, mastery giving "dps", resolve increasing with mastery and stamina, sounds like we're actually becoming a tank and not critt focused dps who can take a bit more dmg then a rogue

i aprove!

Edit: sure hope we wont suffer same issue as we had until mid t15 where stats were so low that it was hard having shuffle at 100%

[Super Kami Dende]

My only dislike is Clash getting removed, I used to Enjoy pulling as much as possible whilst running past a bunch of mobs and then 180 turning and charging the furtherest away!

But yeah the removal is so trivial to me that I do not really care much.

Overall good patch notes for every class/Spec!

[Totaltotemic]

reading the increased stamina, mastery giving "dps", resolve increasing with mastery and stamina, sounds like we're actually becoming a tank and not critt focused dps who can take a bit more dmg then a rogue

i aprove!

Edit: sure hope we wont suffer same issue as we had until mid t15 where stats were so low that it was hard having shuffle at 100%

Speaking of the 20% Stamina bonus, Druids are getting the same thing, which implies righting what has been a little bit of an imbalance all expansion: the fact that Agi tanks do not gem or enchant Stamina and do not use Stamina trinkets.


Also magic stagger is basically the only thing BrM was missing that made it weak in some situations, now it's a very well-rounded tank that might still be a bit overpowered on the damage reduction side of things (assuming no changes to Stagger).

[Shamanberry]

Little sad to see Clash go. With that and the silence on Spear Hand Strike gone, it's going to be tough to group up a pack with multiple casters.

Curious to know how stats are changing, particularly how multistrike is going to work for tanks. No indication for any of the tank classes on that one yet, though, so possible they just haven't finalized how it works.

Edit: sure hope we wont suffer same issue as we had until mid t15 where stats were so low that it was hard having shuffle at 100%

Yeah, that's going to be an interesting shock to the system with the gear reset. Things played a lot differently back in 5.0 than they do today. Depending on how shuffle and mitigation in general evolves over the course of beta, it could make Chi Serenity a much more valuable talent in the early game than it will be later.

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah, that's going to be an interesting shock to the system with the gear reset. Things played a lot differently back in 5.0 than they do today. Depending on how shuffle and mitigation in general evolves over the course of beta, it could make Chi Serenity a much more valuable talent in the early game than it will be later.

Just some insanely quick spit-balling here, but Chi Serenity could technically be 10 BoKs in 10 seconds every 1.5 minutes, or 60 seconds of Shuffle... for free. I doubt that Shuffle uptime will ever be a problem.

[Hugme]

Clash has been removed.

ಠ_ಠ

Might just roll Bear.

[Sunnydee]

ಠ_ಠ

Might just roll Beer.

Fix'd*

had a glance at druids, meh no chance all that can go live, clash was a "niche" in my eyes. u can still taunt for movement speed on mobs

[Pandragon]

Lets have a moment of silence for Clash.

My most favorite Brewmaster ability. This ability won my team an RBG one time. The enemy team was heading in for their final cap, I was rushing in to grab the flag. I caught up to him just before he capped. Clashed him back to me, then Leg Sweeped him and grabbed the flag. My dps got in to him burst him down as I headed back to base and got our final cap.


OT: I like a lot of the other changes being made. Except Ring of peace, it was fine. We needed Rushing Ox or LEg Sweep to be replaced by an incap effect, now our silence.

[Deleted]

Mastery is definitely going to get changed, isn't it. Seems too strong.

[The Madgod]

OT: I like a lot of the other changes being made. Except Ring of peace, it was fine. We needed Rushing Ox or LEg Sweep to be replaced by an incap effect, now our silence.

The change is obviously because of their attempts to shy away from such effects in PvP.

From a PvE perspective it entirely guts RoP's usefulness. It's like BoF's glyph, it disorients, but that's just a way for them to line up attack timers and increase burst damage taken. Overall it's not worth it, not when a stun is equally effective and doesn't break on hit.

[Totaltotemic]

Mastery is definitely going to get changed, isn't it. Seems too strong.

I can totally see either Shuffle, SotSO, or base mastery being lowered. Stagger is way too strong when it starts out at 46% base, if they just lowered the base amount it wouldn't be so broken.

[Mormolyce]

My only real dislike is the loss of Clash.

Am I the only person who loves Clash? Couldn't they just remove the stun?

[arcuro]

i liked clash a lot, it never bugged for me, and it was so much fun to use when you now it.. R.I.P
also RoP changes i feel a bit sad, but i can handle ist.. i only do PvE so its not that bad for me

transcendence instant i like it, maybe i will use it more now
Dizzing haze with no energy cost? hell yes, in our group i am the only one who can realy kite things at ease, so spamming my brew and maintain full energy when i run into the pack? nice
Breath of Fire.. i would realy like to see shuffle backed in it, but maybe with the dot applied, i can live with it

Touch of Death is great, now remove the chi cost and remove the glyphe, or change the glyphe so that ToD will cost 3 chi and can be used at 25% health
Avert Harm was nive for me, but all tanks will have their raid cd removed, so i am fine with it

guard changes seems interesting

mastery and resolve changes? realy nice!

i like chi serenity and soul dance.. first for physical boss fights, last for magical ones.. i dont like chi explosion.. it want full control of my chi, and not everything backed in one spell... i just cant get arround this talent..

and the best change: no mor x085% damage multiplier in the character sheet.. i hate this red number!!!

[Deleted]

I can totally see either Shuffle, SotSO, or base mastery being lowered. Stagger is way too strong when it starts out at 46% base, if they just lowered the base amount it wouldn't be so broken.

As long as it doesn't make BMs have the same issues that they had in 5.0 I wouldn't mind a nerf to mastery. 5.0 Though is something I don't want to go through again, not after what I got used to in 5.2 and 5.4.